The Stone Light

by Kai Meyer

  “Hurry up,” Vermithrax called to her as she was fastening the straps of her new knapsack.

  “I’m coming,” she said—and suddenly she had a feeling of being watched.

  Her fingers let go of the leather straps, and—despite the omnipresent warmth—she shivered. Her hair was standing on end. Her heart skipped a beat once, then began racing again, so suddenly that it almost hurt.

  Confused, she looked toward the back of the plateau, to the rock wall, then over at the tents and at both openings to the paths that led up and down from there. Nothing moved. There was no one there. Only Vermithrax, who stood at the edge of the cliff, tapping impatiently on the rock with one claw.

  “What is wrong?” asked the Queen.

  “Don’t you feel anything?”

  “Your fear masks everything.”

  “Hurry up,” Vermithrax called. He still hadn’t noticed anything.

  Merle dashed toward him. She didn’t know what she was running from, or if there was even a reason for her fear. She had almost reached Vermithrax when a piercing, screeching sound, drawn out and painful, made her whirl around.

  At first she didn’t see anything. Not really. But there was something, a movement perhaps, a change near the place where she’d shouldered the knapsack.

  “Merle!”

  The rock quivered under her feet as Vermithrax sped to her, much faster and more nimbly than she would have thought possible, a black flash of obsidian who was suddenly behind her, scooping her from the floor with one of his wings and letting her slide down a ramp of stone feathers.

  “Lilim,” sounded in her head, and it took a moment before she realized that it wasn’t her own thought but a shout from the Flowing Queen.

  Vermithrax began to lift off. An instant later they were rushing out over the edge of the cliff, still in a leap, not in flight. They dropped a good yard down into emptiness before the wings of the weighty lion stabilized their position in the air, at the same time bearing them away from the abandoned camp of the Czarist expedition and the spirit of death enveloping the empty tents.

  Merle started to look around, but the Queen said sharply, “Do not do that!”

  Of course she did it anyway.

  The rock wall had come alive. Then Merle realized that it wasn’t the stone itself that had begun moving but something that had perhaps been there the entire time, had been lurking, or was just now creeping out of some invisible cracks and holes like the scarab swarms of the Empire.

  The entire surface of what she’d taken for mere rock had dissolved and now streamed from all sides toward the rock ledge, a concentration and agglomeration so strange and bizarre that she couldn’t think of any human or animal motion like it. It wasn’t like the crawling of insects, even if that perhaps came closest; it was more as if the dark scales and shells billowed in grotesque zigzags on the plateau, apparently without order, completely chaotic, and yet so purposefully that within seconds the ring enclosed the rock ledge.

  Under the rippling top surface, which consisted of a host of man-sized bodies, Merle saw more and more tilted strands and structures that might be limbs, many times broken and angled, spiderlike and yet so utterly different. As they moved, they left behind a track of deep scars in the rock where they’d dug in their invisible claws and slashed the stone, tangled paths like a relief by a mad sculptor.

  The dark flood poured over the edges of the plateau from all directions, also down from the overhang, and buried the tents and the chests under them. The creatures concealed themselves behind their stony shells, or what Merle took to be shells, and yet any brief flash of fangs or claws was enough to fill her with sheer terror.

  Faster and faster, Vermithrax hurried out into the emptiness, away from what was taking place behind them. But Merle still saw the plateau sink completely under the assault of the Lilim, swallowed up, like a stone inexorably pulled down into a vortex of quicksand.

  As if by itself, Merle’s hand crept into the pocket where she kept the mirror. She absently pushed her fingers through the surface, deeper into the warmth of the magic place behind it. Very briefly she thought she heard a whisper, a voice—of the phantom trapped in there?—then she thrust her arm in up to the elbow, and finally she again felt the hand that grasped hers from the other side and stroked her fingers, gently reassuring her.

  4 THE ENCLAVE

  THE SKY HUNG GRAY AND HEAVY OVER VENICE, foretelling the rain that would soon be pelting onto the palazzos and canals. A cutting wind, much too cool for this time of year, was blowing in from the north and whistling down the crooked streets, across deserted piazzas and the promenades along the banks of the islands. It swirled up fliers that the indefatigable resisters had distributed a few days before, after the appearance of the messenger from Hell and his offer to protect the Venetians from the armies of the Empire. The fliers were full of slogans, slogans against the city councillors and the Pharaoh and anyone else who could be blamed for the desperate situation, slogans that might have put them in prison in other times, most certainly in the pillory. But today no one cared about that anymore. Fear held all Venice under its spell, so absolutely, so hopelessly, that even the soldiers of the City Guard forgot to arrest troublemakers and insurgents.

  In the very heart of this rebellion, in the secret hideout of the rebels—the enclave, as Dario had called the building—Serafin was eating breakfast.

  He wasn’t doing it very calmly, naturally, but not in a hurry, either, for he knew he could do nothing but wait. They would call him sooner or later and take him to their leader, the master of the enclave. Neither Dario nor any of the others had called the leader of the rebellion by name—obviously a precautionary measure. And yet the others’ mysteriousness made Serafin more uneasy than he was willing to admit.

  The palazzo lay in the center of Venice, hardly more than a stone’s throw from a half dozen famous buildings and places. And yet there was an aura of solitude around it—solitude a little too intense for it not to be magical, thought Serafin.

  The night before, on the way here, he and his three escorts had encountered traces of the invasion that was beginning all over Venice. On several canal banks they’d found the empty metal shells in which the mummy soldiers had penetrated the labyrinth of watery streets. They discovered no trace of the soldiers themselves, but they all realized that there was no going back now. The mummies were roaming through the streets, singly or in small groups, spreading fear and horror and completing the taking of the city from within. Here and there Serafin and the others had heard loud voices in the distance, also screams. Once they’d caught the sound of the clash of steel on the other side of a block of houses, but when they arrived they found only corpses, which Serafin identified as members of the Thieves’ Guild.

  No one understood very well what the Pharaoh had in mind with this sort of attack. His war galleys and sunbarks lay in sight of the quays of the lagoon, and it would have been easy to send soldiers on land all around the main island.

  Serafin guessed that the Pharaoh was only trying to rattle the Venetians. But the lagoon dwellers could scarcely be further rattled after more than three decades of siege. And if it were pure cruelty? The macabre fun of beginning the invasion small, in order to then drive the attack to high pitch in a storm of fire and steel?

  Serafin didn’t understand it all, and he hoped that the master of the enclave had some answers ready for his questions.

  The room into which Tiziano had led him was on the second floor of the palazzo. As with most of the old palaces, the ground floor was empty. At one time, when all these buildings had still belonged to the rich merchant families of the city, there had been merchandise and goods stored there below, in unornamented halls that every few years would be flooded by acqua alta, Venice’s famed high waters.

  But today, after so many years of isolation, there was hardly any trade in Venice, and the little that remained made no one rich. Most of the well-to-do families had fled to the mainland long ago, right at the begi
nning of the war, never supposing that there they would be helplessly delivered to the mummy armies and scarab swarms. No one could have foreseen that the power of the Flowing Queen would protect the city, and it was a malicious irony of fate that those who had enough money to flee were the first to fall victim to the Egyptians.

  The windows and doors of the empty ground floor were walled up with large stones, apparently long before anyone ever even thought of a resurrection of the Pharaoh. The rebels had not settled into an abandoned building. Serafin assumed that the leader of the rebellion had been living here for a long time already. Perhaps a nobleman. Or even a merchant, one of the few who were still left.

  Serafin shoved the last piece of bread into his mouth as the door of the bare room opened. Tiziano told him to come with him.

  Serafin followed the former apprentice mirror maker through corridors and suites, up a staircase, and under an archway. He didn’t see another soul the entire time. It seemed as though all were strictly forbidden to enter the apartments of the master of the enclave. But at the same time, Serafin had the feeling that the atmosphere of the corridors and high rooms had altered, a scarcely noticeable shift of reality to something different, confusing. It wasn’t that the light changed, or the smell—everything here smelled moldy and of damp stone—no, it was the way his surroundings felt, as if he were perceiving with a new sensory organ that had only been waiting to finally be activated.

  At Tiziano’s bidding he stopped before a double door, almost three times as tall as he was.

  “Wait here,” said Tiziano. “You’ll be called in.” He turned to go.

  Serafin grabbed his shoulder. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to the others.”

  “You aren’t staying here?”

  “No.”

  Serafin looked mistrustfully from Tiziano to the door, then back again. “This isn’t some trap or something?” He felt a little foolish as he voiced this suspicion, but he couldn’t forget his old quarrel with Dario. He believed his—former?—archenemy was capable of any meanness.

  “What would be the sense of that?” asked Tiziano. “We could just have left you to the mummies, couldn’t we? Things would have taken care of themselves.”

  Serafin still hesitated, then he nodded slowly. “Sorry. That was ungrateful.”

  Tiziano grinned at him. “Dario can be quite a pain, huh?”

  Serafin couldn’t help smiling back. “You and Boro, you’ve noticed that?”

  “Even Dario has his good sides. A few of them. Otherwise he wouldn’t be here.”

  “That probably goes for all of us, I guess.”

  Tiziano gave an encouraging nod toward the door. “Just wait.” With that, he finally turned and walked briskly back the way they had come. The thought sizzled through Serafin’s head that he’d never find his way back alone. The interior of the enclave was a first-class maze.

  The right half of the door was swung open by an invisible hand, and at once he was enveloped in something light and soft, which played around his body like a hundred gentle fingers, light as a feather, almost bodiless. Surprised, he took a step backward. It was only a filmy silk curtain that a draft was blowing against him.

  “Enter,” said a voice. A woman’s voice.

  Serafin obeyed and pushed the curtain aside, very carefully, because he had the feeling that the delicate tissue could tear between his fingers like spiderwebs. Behind that, barely six feet away, a wall of curtains bellied out, all of the same material and in the same light yellow, which reminded him of the color of beach sand. He remembered to close the door behind him before he began to move. Then he ventured deeper into that labyrinth of silk.

  He passed one curtain after another, until he gradually lost all orientation, even though he’d only been going straight the entire time. How far behind him was the door? A hundred yards, or only ten, fifteen?

  Gradually he was able to make out shapes behind the silk, angled silhouettes, pieces of furniture perhaps. At the same time the damp, moldy smell of Venice was overlaid with an exotic scent, a whole explosion of smells. They reminded him of the strange spices he’d once stolen from a merchant’s storeroom, years before.

  On the other side of the curtain lay another world.

  The ground was strewn with sand, so high that his boots sank into it without hitting any firm ground. The ceiling was hung with lengths of dark blue material, which provided a sharp contrast to the surrounding lightness, like an evening sky over the desert. And then he realized that this was exactly the impression that all this was supposed to awaken: the illusion of a desert landscape, completely artificial, and yet so different from anything that one could ever find in Venice. There were no painted dunes, no statues of camels or Bedouins; nothing here was real, and still it all seemed as convincing as an actual visit to the desert—at least to Serafin, who’d never left the lagoon.

  Several islands of soft cushions were piled up in the center of this wondrous place. The spicy smell came from bowls, from which hair-thin columns of smoke were curling up. Between the cushions was a pedestal of coarse sandstone and on it, heavy and blocky, stood a round water basin of the same material. The surface was a good three feet in diameter and was stirring slightly. Behind the basin stood a woman, only her upper body visible. She had thrust her right arm into the water up to the elbow. At first Serafin thought she was stirring it, but then he saw that she was holding her arm completely still.

  She looked up and smiled. “Serafin,” she said, and he found it quite astonishing how melodious his name sounded when such a creature spoke it.

  She was beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful woman that he’d ever seen—and as the messenger boy of Umberto, who wove magic fabrics for Venice’s noblewomen, he’d encountered many a beauty. She had smooth, raven-black hair, so long that the ends disappeared behind the edge of the sandstone vessel. Her slender body was clothed in skintight material, napped like fine fur and of the same yellow as the curtains. Large, hazelnut brown eyes inspected him. Her lips were full and dark red, although he was certain that she wore no makeup. The skin of her face and her left hand, resting on the edge of the basin, were dark, not black like one of the Moors, of whom there were several in Venice, but tanned dark by the sun.

  And then, in a flash, he knew.

  She was an Egyptian.

  He knew it with absolute certainty, before she directed another word to him or could introduce herself. The leader of the rebellion against the Egyptians was an Egyptian.

  “Have no fear,” she said, when she noticed that he recoiled a step. “You are in safety. No one here will do anything bad to you.” A spark of regret burned in her eyes as she took her right arm out of the water and laid it in front of her on the stone rim. Neither hand nor arm was wet. There was no trace of water beading on her skin or on the strange material of her clothing.

  “Who are you?” He had the feeling he was stammering terribly. He had every reason to.

  “Lalapeya,” said the woman. “I don’t believe you know the language from which this name comes.”

  “Egyptian?” He felt brave, downright daring, when he said this one word.

  Her laugh was very clear, almost melodic. “Egyptian? Oh no, absolutely not. This name was already old when the first pharaohs mounted their golden thrones many thousands of years ago.”

  And with that she came out from behind the basin in a strange, flowing movement that disconcerted Serafin and confused him—until he saw her legs.

  She had four of them.

  The legs of a lioness. The lower body of a lioness.

  Serafin started back so violently that he got tangled up in one of the silken curtains, lost his balance, and fell over backward, pulling a torrent of yellow silk with him.

  When he had finally freed himself, she was standing directly in front of him. If he stretched out an arm, he could touch one of her paws, the soft yellow fur that covered her and that he’d just taken for a tight-fitting dress.

  �
�You-You are…”

  “Certainly not a mermaid.”

  “A sphinx!” escaped him. “A sphinx of the Pharaoh!”

  “The last part is not true. I have not met the Pharaoh, ever, and I regret it most deeply that some of my people serve him.”

  Serafin tried to get to his feet, but he only partially succeeded, and when he again pulled back from her, one foot dragged the pulled-down curtain with him, two, three paces away.

  The lion paws carried the sphinx after him in an elegant motion. “Please, Serafin. I’ve shown you so that you know whom you’re dealing with. But it wasn’t urgently necessary.”

  “What—What do you mean?”

  She smiled, and it made her look so pretty that it almost pained him to see the animal part of her body at the same time. “What do I mean? Oh, Serafin! This, of course.”

  At the sound of the words, her image blurred before his eyes. At first Serafin thought that the sand was billowing up from the ground, but then he realized that it was more than that.

  She wasn’t only blurred in his perception—her entire body seemed to dissolve for one second and reconstitute itself, not a flowing transition but an explosion-like whirl, as she dispersed in a cloud of tiny little parts, then in the same breath put herself back together as something new. Something different.

  Her face and the slender upper body remained unchanged, but now they no longer grew out of the body of a lion but continued naturally into narrow hips and long, brown legs. The legs of a woman.